Monday, September 13, 2010

Interior House Paint

House Paint: Prepare Room, Move Furniture

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Most of the information I have seen about painting around furniture while working on your interior house painting project tells you to move all of the furniture to the center of the room. This really is not very helpful. Think about a bedroom or living room. If you move all of the furniture to the middle of the room, you have created a huge obstacle to paint around. Even with the proper extension pole for your paint roller, such an obstacle in the center of the room is hard to work around. it is hard to reach over this obstacle to paint the ceiling.
What Interior House Painting Blog recommends is that you move the furniture away from the walls and arrange it with a few pieces in different areas of the room. This makes it easier to work around. Think of a chain of islands spread around the room rather than a huge continent in the center. Just make sure that you leave enough room between islands and walls to place a ladder next to them.
When moving furniture, practice safe lifting.

When moving furniture, take care not to damage it. Smaller light weight pieces of furniture can be picked up and moved. You may have to slide heavier pieces across the floor. Another thing to be very concerned about is the floor. Be careful not to scratch or cut any wooden or tile floors. Also, something that you may not think of is damage to carpet. Pushing or sliding heavy pieces of furniture across carpets can buckle the carpet, creating “hills and valleys” or lumps in carpet. What you need to do to avoid damage to any type of floor is to put large pieces of cardboard under the furniture and slide the furniture across the cardboard, thus protecting the floor. Visit a retail store to ask for some large, empty cardboard boxes and collapse the boxes to have a nice sheet of cardboard to slide the furniture over. Make sure the cardboard is thick enough, and be sure to remove any staples in the cardboard. Doing this at the beginning of your interior house painting project will avoid any damage to your floors.
You must also be very careful with any electrical outlets or switches in the room. You need to turn off the circuit breakers for the outlets in the room you are working on to avoid shock. Latex paint contains a lot of water, and everyone knows that water conducts electricity. Sometimes you may need to turn off more than one breaker for one room. A foolproof way to see if an outlet is off is to use a circuit tester. Inexpensive circuit testers may be purchased at any hardware store. Circuit testers consist of two wires or bars connected to a sealled light. If you plug the circuit tester into any outlet and it lights up, you will know you were not successful in turning off all electricity to the room you want to paint and you will have to to turn off the right breaker, perhaps several. After all of the electricity in the room is off, it is safe to remover the switch plates and outlet covers so as not to get any paint on them. Place all of the screws in a glass and be sure to place it somewhere that it will not be forgotten or knocked over.
You must cover all of your furniture with drop cloths. For this, use plastic sheets that you can buy at any paint or hardware store. Buy the thicker sheets. The thin sheets of plastic are hard to unfold and also tear easily. There are also drop cloths for your interior house painting job that are paper on one side and plastic on the other. These are also ideal for covering floors. You now know the best and the quickest way to set up a room to begin your interior house painting project.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Two-color Paint Effect

House Paint:

Do you live in an older house with plaster walls? Sometimes those old walls become uneven over time due to their nature, or bad patch repair jobs have created uneven spots, making the walls look irregular and bumpy. Rather than go to the expense of re-plastering whole walls, or replacing them with drywall (because you want to maintain the character of the house), here’s an easy solution to keep your eyes focused on the beauty of the wall, rather than the imperfect lumpy appearance: Apply a two-color paint effect with a roller finish.

Using two different, but complimentary, paint colors (one lighter than the other) will create a texture and finish that not only disguises any surface variations, but also lends depth and character to a wall. For this simple application you will need two cans of matte latex paint in complimentary colors, a roller tray, a masonry roller, and a 2-inch paint brush, as well as some drop cloth and painter’s tape to protect your ceiling, crown molding and base molding.

1. Pour about 1 pint of each color of paint into opposite sides of the deep end of the roller tray. They will sit next to each other without mixing too much. When you put the roller into the paint, remember to always keep the handle pointed in the same direction so you won’t blend the colors together in the tray.

2. Roll the roller into the paint, and then roll it backward and forward just once on the ridged part of the tray so the roller is thickly coated with the two shades of paint.

3. Work across the wall in sections of about 3-feet square (but a more roughly circular shape) to help prevent any hard lines. Roll the paint onto the wall in single, long strokes to transfer the majority of the paint onto the wall surface. Space each stroke of the roller a few inches apart from the other strokes. Then, without putting the roller back into the paint, roll it lightly across the thick strokes of paint on the wall, gently blending the colors together. Use the roller at different angles to develop a subtle, mottled finish. Keep in mind the more you roll over the wet paint, the more the colors will blend and the subtler the effect will be.

4. For corners and edges of the wall where the roller won’t reach, dip the end of the paint brush into both colors in the paint tray and dapples it onto those areas to maintain the two-tone effect.

5. Another variation of this technique is to give the wall a base coat of paint in a third complimentary color. Let the paint dry, then roller the other two colors loosely over the base coat and slightly blend them, keeping the effect dramatic and emphasizing the roller’s texture.

6. If a wall is mildly uneven, a subtle color contrast will work well. If a wall is very uneven, use more strongly contrasting colors that will give a bolder finish and will disguise bad patch-work more effectively. Remember, the more contrast between the two colors, the more dramatic and stronger the visual effect will be.Wholesale Paint Store